Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Tough day at the office for BlackMatch in Match Cup Sweden

Hello again from BlackMatch,

Day two of Match Cup Sweden was one to forget for BlackMatch, it has been a long while since we went a day without out a win but today was a disaster and we had 4 straight defeats to finish last in our group. All is not lost however as we still have the chance to win our way through in a repecharge series which will start tomorrow for the bottom 8 teams.

With only a single win from our 6 matches, we have failed to put things together so far in this event and it would appear we are struggling, but the truth is that we are very much in the game and will come out fighting tomorrow for the two remaining quarterfinal berths. All of our matches today were very close and there are just key moments we can pinpoint that contributed to all of our losses, it is these mistakes that we need to eliminate if we are progress further in this event.

Perhaps a good example of this was in our match up against 6 times Match Cup Sweden Champion Peter Gilmour. We absolutely nailed the veteran in the pre-start, managing to lock him out above the committee boat end of the start-line, however the crafty Australian forced his way in between us and the boat end and although he was given a red flag penalty to be taken immediately, he still was only half a boat length behind after undertaking it. ‘Gilly’ then showed his class to stay in touch up the first beat and was hot on our heals going into the first downwind. He did a great job of initiating the gybe to the bottom mark whereas we held for too long and the following luffing situation saw them roll over the top of us to gain the lead, from here he defended well and took the victory.

We are in very good company in the bottom 8 repecharge series which includes the two previous Match Cup Sweden Champions Mattias Rahm and Bjorn Hansen, World number 1 Sebastian Col and current World Champion Ian Williams. Although we have an uphill battle from here, we are looking forward to the challenge ahead.